Video: Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery

We've written about Google Talks before (see Google TechTalks: Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Biofuels) and how they are a good way to hear speakers talk about a variety of topics, including environment-related ones. Today we want to highlight this Google Talk by Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery (the company was formed in 1998 and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland) about how we can harness the ocean's waves to create clean energy. The talk is a bit technical and long, and the presentation is not very exciting, but if you can get passed that, the content is very interesting. If Mr. Carcas or anyone at Ocean Power Delivery is reading this, we'd love for you to make a shorter and more "viewer-friendly" version of this talk. We'd definitely show it on TreeHugger, wave power deserves a bigger share of the spotlight.

For those who still doubt the potential of wave energy: "The World Energy Council has estimated the ‘useful’ global ocean wave energy resource as ... >2TW (17,500TWh/year). From this it has been estimated (Thorpe 1999) that the practical economic contribution from wave energy converters could be 2,000TWh/year (similar to current installed nuclear or hydroelectric generation capacity). Such generating capacity could result in up to 2 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions being displaced from fossil fuel generation per year - similar to current emissions from electricity generation in the US." Max Carcas also says (we're paraphrasing): If you take a square meter on the ground, with solar, you have around 100 watts of energy. A square meter in the air, with wind you may have a thousand watts. But off the coasts of Europe and North-America, you have energy densities of 20,000 to 70,000 watts per square meter of ocean. You can watch the video here.